this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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though the meme is cool, gender isn't particularly a biology (or 'advance biology') thing. biology deals with sexes, their expressions and functionalities. gender is more of a personal and social concept but often related to sex characteristics (cis).
and yes, advanced biology tells sex determination isn't as easy as XX or XY or even looking at genitals like a creep.
and oh, for giggles consider fungi :)
Adding to this: XX and XY works for mammals, but not for other vertebrates (fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians). Birds and reptiles have Z and W chromosomes, and unlike in mammals where females are homozygotes, males in these groups are homozygotes. Some reptiles have temperature dependent sex determination, where ambient temperature above some value will produce males or females (depends on species). Some reptiles are composed entirely of females.
Some fish will straight up change sexes depending on age and male-female ratio in a social group.
In other groups it's not even different chromosomes but simply copy number of specific genes.
Plants can do all sorts of whacky things like produce seeds and pollen in the same individual.
Fungi are an entirely different cluster fuck because they have mating types which are not simple binaries.
Eukaryotic sex determination isn't a binary and it isn't even a nicely categorizable spectrum. It's a grab-bag of whatever doesn't perma-fuck your genome.
Source: me, I'm a biologist. Though admittedly I work on animals so my understanding of fungi and plant stuff is fuzzy at best.
And bee queen generate full-animal-sized flying sperm, aka drones.
https://xkcd.com/435/
I would say gender is probably centered about around psychology, ranges mostly from sociology to biology, with a just little bit going into chemistry
maybe like
What's the y-axis?
practical importance to gender
As perceived by me
(only the most scientific of measurements)
More yes
Reason for another XKCD comic about bad graphs (or ten).
purity.
as in whether it applies to the real world is entirely a symbolic construct that has no use/reflection of the real world.
Slime mold(which is not a mold or fungi) looks around nervously in it's 13 different sexes.
Psychology is technically a branch of advanced biology
plenty of animals can gender swap, be hermaphrodites, or produce asexually.
But it easy, we just make it complicated with social bullshit and attention craving. The fact that no one is exactly set to be perfect copies, doesnt mean anything. The fact that outliers exist, doesnt mean anything. You ask the owner of a dog if its a boy or a girl, they will tell you. And you wanna know how they know? They looked between its legs. It really is, that easy.
The kind of logic being pushed today, is basically saying that you cant class human beings as a bipedal species because 200 per million people are born with no legs. Which is dumb as fuck.
I think things get taken too far in some contexts, but the underlying sensitivity is when you are talking to a person who considers themselves an outlier. Like telling someone with no legs that they don't meet the definition of human and ADA is an abomination that should be repealed. Or telling someone diagnosed with conversion disorder that they can't receive any physical accommodations, and can't have any medical consults to check if their symptoms might have a different cause. I hope we can agree those would be insensitive positions to take.
Why would I say someone with no legs wasnt human? If anything, that would be your stance. No? Im not the one excluding outliers, you all are. And then your using 0.018% of the population to justify it.
I am confused. I thought the thread was about gender, and the reference to "social bullshit" and the statement "that outliers exist, doesnt mean anything" were statements in support of excluding transgender people from society. The 0.018% stat (rate of intersex if defined narrowly) is clearly a reference to sex, not gender. So now I am just lost.
Now you know how everyone else feels. It used to be focused on gender. But theres been a pivot to sex. Why? I dont know. It seems like people all of sudden want "trans" be a dirty word, and by people, I dont mean MAGA chuds who hate anything that its them.
‘I am biologically female.’ was said by Beth Upton, during a court case into whether or not she received abuse from a Nurse. Followed by: 'the terms biological male and female had no defined and agreed meaning in science' and ‘Biological sex is a nebulous term and it doesn’t really mean anything, because nobody can accurately or usefully define biological sex because pretty much every human I’m aware of is at least in part biological and many of them have a sex characteristic.’
Similar things are popping up all over social media. I dont care what anyone says they are. Trans, non binary, whatever. They can all live their lives as they see fit. Its this push to justify it with outliers thats annoying. And it just takes us right back to the arguments over attack helicopters, which I thought were long behind us.